


This York/Carolina Thing

by anneapocalypse



Series: The Meta: Essays on Red vs. Blue [1]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: F/M, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-16
Updated: 2012-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-15 04:48:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16926798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anneapocalypse/pseuds/anneapocalypse
Summary: This is a nonfiction meta essay on how Carolina and York's relationship is written and portrayed in seasons 9 and 10.While this essay takes a critical view of the relationship as portrayed in canon, this is strictly an analysis of the source material, and not shipping discourse.





	This York/Carolina Thing

Let's get this out of the way first:

**This is not a post about shipping.**

This is a post about canon.

You can ship what you want to ship. You can headcanon whatever you like for the things you ship. Nothing in this post is meant to imply that York/Carolina is A Bad Ship that no one should ship, nor is it meant to imply that no one else is aware of the problems in canon, because I know that’s not the case.

None of my RvB ships are canon. I am well aware of this,  _trust me_. And if you've read much fic of mine you know that I have absolutely no problem doing backflips over canon when it suits me, when I find it necessary to tell a better story, or when, frankly, I feel like it.  Shipping doesn't mean you aren't aware of canon, and I know there are plenty of people who ship York/Carolina in their own way while taking issue with the way it's handled on the show.

And there's nothing whatsoever wrong with that.

This is not a post about shipping.

This is a post about canon.

 

There seems to have been some, shall I say,  _disagreement_  among us fans as to whether York and Carolina were, at any point, in a relationship. As in, dating. As in, together.

That we haven’t been able to agree on that - right there's the main problem.

Simply put, York at multiple points acts as though he and Carolina are in a relationship; he behaves in ways that  _only_  make sense if an ongoing relationship exists. By contrast, Carolina’s actions are at best ambiguous. What could be seen as romance could easily be interpreted as friendship or even just camaraderie. York's actions leave no such ambiguity.

This is a problem.

 

The piece of music we hear in the elevator during York and Carolina's final fight is titled "Ballet Breakup." I didn't know this until the soundtrack came out.

I was thrown, and I don't think I was the only one, by York's journal entry in which he describes meeting Carolina at the nightclub Errera. At the time, I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to indicate. It seemed to suggest that York and Carolina met sometime before Project Freelancer, though that had never before been suggested.

The combination of that journal entry, the song title, and the fact that Carolina still has York’s lighter in the elevator scene leads me to believe that Rooster Teeth did, in fact, intend to portray an existing relationship between York and Carolina.

Unfortunately, those are the strongest clues we get. And the first one doesn’t come until halfway through Season 10.

 

I know  _now_ that people had been shipping York and Carolina since Season 5 (as a result of them being mentioned in the same sentence I guess), and I understand that Rooster Teeth takes cues from the fans sometimes and that’s fine - but you shouldn’t need to be active in the fandom to understand what the fuck the show is doing. I didn’t go into Season 9 shipping anything, really. I was just thrilled and a half to see Project Freelancer, since that shadowy backstory had always been my favorite part of the RvB world.

After this season's soundtrack came out, I went back and revisited Season 9.

I wanted to know what, if anything, I had missed.

 

So let’s take a look at Season 9.

The first problem is that York doesn’t show up until Episode 10, halfway through the season, in the match against Tex. We never see York and Carolina’s relationship before Tex, and that’s a huge problem considering that Tex is supposed to be what changes everything. You need to show us a solid “before” to give us context for the “after.”

What little context we get is the concern Carolina does show for York early on, quite a bit in fact, particularly when he’s injured. Their moment in the control room during the planning of the Sarcophagus mission is a great one; Carolina greets him, asks how he is, looks him in the eye, her voice softens. It’s the most affection she shows him in the whole series.

The problem is that, well,  _that’s the most affection she shows him in the whole series_. And it’s not enough. It’s not clear from that moment whether they have an established relationship, or whether they’re simply interested in each other, or even whether they’re simply close friends. It’s the strongest case for romantic interest from Carolina, for sure. But it doesn’t establish that they are  _together_. And if they’re supposed to be, not establishing that is a problem, especially later on. But we’ll come back to that.

The first hints of friction between them show up right on the Sarcophagus mission, though it’s subtle stuff, and easy to miss if you aren’t looking for it. Carolina in the field is all business, but when York botches the lockpick he tries to charm his way out of trouble, which doesn’t work on Carolina. “Does saying ‘sorry’ count as doing something? ...Huh, guess not.”

It also becomes clear on the Sarcophagus mission that Carolina’s concern for York’s safety is easily comparable to her concern for other members of her team. If there’s one thing Season 9 establishes effectively, it’s that Carolina cares about her team. In particular, listen to that “No!” she screams out when Maine gets shot. She and Maine have great chemistry when they fight back to back on the flatbed, too. Her banter with Wash when they fight together is very comfortable as well.

Compare that with how she and York interact on a mission - they almost seem to chafe against each other a little. In hindsight, I think two things are at play here. First, Carolina’s team leader, and if they’re together it’s entirely possible she’s being harder on York to avoid any appearances of favoritism. (She also tends to send him off on solo tasks, away from her - you see this again in Season 10.)

Second, well, they’re both cocky as snot and like to show off. Look at how York exaggerates the difficulty of finding the window-washing rig, as if he wants to impress her. Wash pokes fun at Carolina’s showing off after their fight scene, though York wasn’t even there for that one. It’s a noteworthy difference between them: York wants to impress Carolina, whereas Carolina needs to impress  _everyone_.

As soon as Tex shows up, of course, Carolina’s focus goes to her. And at this point, we get the first hint that York really doesn’t understand where Carolina’s head is at. “Who cares who gets it first?” Um, York, have you  _met_ this woman?

The season closes with Carolina proclaiming her loyalty to the Director, making it absolutely clear where her priorities are.

 

I was actually surprised how much I enjoyed watching York and Carolina’s Season 9 interactions this time around. Assuming they were already in a relationship put a different spin on things; without that lens I wouldn’t have noticed all the subtle interactions between them, subtlety being something I don’t exactly expect from RvB.

But up until this point, the exact nature of their relationship was not so crucial. I could interpret them as close friends, as teammates with feelings for each other, or as a couple who also work on a team - and seeing the latter doesn’t take away from Carolina’s obvious care for the rest of her team as well. All three interpretations work, and none of them do any particular disservice to the characters involved.

Season 10 is where things get... weird.

 

None of Carolina’s initial affection for York carries over into Season 10, and I mean  _none_. They don’t talk to each other, they don’t sit together, at no point do we see them spend any time together just because they want to, the way we see York spending time with Wash and North. We never see one of them say something nice to the other just because they can, like South does to CT before the scrapyard mission. When Carolina does speak to York on missions, she’s very short with him, more so than in Season 9. The closest they come to actual mutual interaction is during the freefall, when they’re both picking on Wash - but even then, they never speak to each other, just to Wash, so as great as that scene is, it’s still not direct contact.

For most of Season 10 it’s a strain to imagine they’re still together at all, even if they were in Season 9.

And as the season goes on, the one-sidedness starts to emerge with a vengeance. The less attention Carolina gives York, the more persistent his attention becomes.

Carolina never even talks about York, never mind directly to him, while York talks about Carolina repeatedly. He comments on the fact that Carolina gave her AI to Maine, and judging by his tone, something about that seems to bother him. And there’s  _definitely_ a trace of bitterness in his voice during the observation room scene, when he says, “I guess the leaderboard beckons.”

That scene is one of three in particular that come across  _extremely_ one-sided. The second is right before her match with Tex, with York follows Carolina onto the training floor and tries to give her advice on handling the new AIs, while she completely and utterly ignores him. The third is the scene in Recovery, in which York sits by Carolina’s bed for days and holds her hand while she’s unconscious.

 

The ambiguity that was not such a problem in Season 9 is suddenly very much a problem.

And the confusion is a huge disservice to both characters.

If you don’t know there’s meant to be an established relationship, York’s actions do not say anything good about his character. If you read their moments in Season 9 as evidence of romantic  _interest_  rather than an established relationship, you’re left with York following after Carolina, watching her, giving her unwanted advice, when she’s clearly stopped showing any interest in him whatsoever. It looks pretty bad. It looks bad enough if you assume there is a relationship, to be honest; the one-sidedness still makes York look like a controlling jerk, not exactly consistent with the laid-back guy we got to know in Season 9. But without the assumption of a relationship, it looks like him aggressively pursuing someone who’s made it clear they’re not interested. It’s invasive. It’s flat-out creepy.

Holding her hand while she’s unconscious, in particular, is pretty problematic when we’ve never been shown that level of  _mutual_ intimacy between them. The only clues we have that they might have been a thing are a look they shared once, and an incomplete story about a lighter. Those things do not a relationship make.

Shipping fodder, sure. But that’s not the same thing.

On the other hand, assuming that there is an established relationship paints Carolina in the worst possible light. Her flat-out ignoring of York does look cruel if you assume they’re together, even though her own actions as seen in canon were always ambiguous, never definitive. And her sense of betrayal when York helps Tex is confusing, considering she seemed to want nothing to do with him for most of Season 10, so we’re not inclined to be sympathetic toward her anger.

Failing to consistently establish sympathy for Carolina is, in my opinion, the biggest failing of Season 10.

 

A while back I posed a question to the fandom, asking who out there ships York and Carolina  _and_  actually likes Carolina. I asked this not to put people on the defensive about what they ship or who they like (again, my criticisms here are about canon, not about what anybody ships or headcanons), but because I was interested to see how other people came at it.

I got a lot of great, thoughtful answers, and if you have the time I’d recommend reading through [that](http://anneapocalypse.tumblr.com/post/35729006313) [whole](http://anneapocalypse.tumblr.com/post/35729006313) [thread](http://anneapocalypse.tumblr.com/post/35729006313). It certainly changed my perspective on some things, focusing on the potential the relationship had even though the show didn’t live up to it. I really appreciated seeing that potential, especially from other fans who genuinely like Carolina as a person, and have found ways to ship it that don’t steamroll over her free agency and privilege York’s perspective over hers.

One answer in particular gave me pause, though. A couple of people said they didn’t like Carolina  _until_  they saw that York liked her, and then they figured if he saw something in her, it might be worth taking another look.

The idea of York functioning as a sympathy hook for Carolina is a real problem for me, first of all because it functions in lieu of actually developing her as a sympathetic character in her own right, instead defining her in relation to a man, like, oh,  _every other female character on this series_. Getting Real Tired of Your Shit, Burnie.

Then, too, I have a hard time seeing how that even works, considering that Carolina is at her most sympathetic in the beginning of Season 9, when she’s a strong team leader who genuinely cares for her comrades-in-arms. If that wasn’t good enough, why is she suddenly sympathetic because of the affections of a man who by Season 10 she doesn’t even seem to like back?

If anything, the relationship overall  _erodes_ sympathy for Carolina. The assumption that they are together, especially in Season 10, is drawn overwhelmingly from York’s actions, not Carolina’s, and from that assumption it’s all downhill as far as Carolina’s sympathy is concerned.

Even Carolina’s own goddamn dialogue gets turned against her: her “I’m sorry, York; sorry I didn’t listen” when she visits the site of his death, her “Maybe, but you can’t trust me” in the elevator scene - things like this consistently reinforce the idea that York’s perspective is the correct one (despite him never trying to explain it to her), and Carolina’s the one who fucked it all up. From start to finish, Season 10 bludgeons us with the idea that Carolina is always wrong and her perspective is inherently untrustworthy.

I’m not okay with York as a sympathy hook for Carolina because the constant privileging of his perspective over hers is precisely the problem, and exactly what the writers seem to have been counting on.

And somehow she was expected to function as an effective protagonist, and her BIG REVEAL was supposed to have emotional resonance.

Okay.

 

The thing is, if York and Carolina were supposed to be together at the beginning of Season 9,  _why on earth_  didn’t they just show us that? Why dick us around for a season and a half, drop some vague hints, and finally show us a breakup from a relationship we were never sure  _existed?_

It would have been so easy to establish a mutual relationship beyond reasonable doubt early in Season 9. Show us a  _kiss_. Show us Carolina being into it. Show her saying something genuinely affectionate to York, something we can't take as just friendship. Show us  _something_. If they were supposed to be seeing each other then  _why_  didn't we ever see it? Why do we only see York showing attention toward her while she utterly ignores him?

It also would’ve been entirely possible to show York and Carolina’s relationship on the rocks during Season 10, while making it clear the relationship still existed. Show them fighting, for heaven’s sake. And not a fight like the elevator scene in which York never actually explains what’s going on when she has no way of knowing. A plain old relationship fight in which York expresses concern about her and the fact that he misses spending time with her and feels cast aside, and Carolina expresses her frustration that York doesn’t understand what’s important to her, and that she needs to be free to pursue her goals even if they aren’t his goals.

If we’re expected to sympathize with a character’s loss, we need to understand what they lost. York’s journal entries are meant to be poignant reminders of some kind of loss, but they fall flat because we don’t know what exactly York lost. A girlfriend? A friend? An unrequited infatuation?  _What did he have that he lost?_  Everybody’s got their own ideas about this, but the fact is, going purely on canon, particularly at the time we hear the logs,  _we don’t know._

And by the time we get to the elevator scene, it’s really too late to fix this mess, even if York bothered to try and explain to Carolina what’s really going on and why he’s deserting - which he doesn’t. Instead, he asks her to trust him when what we’ve seen between them this season is anything but trust. When Carolina tosses his lighter after him, that gesture is meant to signal the end of the relationship, but from her perspective it seems like it ended a long time ago.

 

There’s probably a very simple reason for this and a lot of other problems with Seasons 9 and 10.

Rooster Teeth was trying to duplicate the success of Season 6 while not actually understanding why Season 6 was so successful.

Once again, I’ll defer to [Larissa](http://ichidou.tumblr.com/post/30393418396) on why 6 worked so well, but in short, it’s because it had a strong story arc. I think RT missed that entirely and assumed that the strength of Season 6 lay in BIG REVEALS.

So they decided to make their focus for 9 and 10 BIG REVEALS.

Seasons 9 and 10 overwhelmingly suffer from a lack of actual  _plotting_ , smack of writers who wrote themselves into corners, and raise far more questions about Project Freelancer than they could ever hope to answer. The writers got so excited about their BIG REVEALS that they put all their energy these two seasons into  _not_ telling us things, and as a result, neglected to tell us things we really needed to know.

Like the fact that, you know, York and Carolina were supposed to be together during Season 9.

 

If I might go out on a very optimistic limb here, I hope Burnie et al take note of at least some of the fan criticisms of Seasons 9 & 10, and gain some insight for future writing.

Characters are the heart of this show and its creators need to remember that.

Gorgeous animation and fight choreography are good things, but don’t forget that you hooked us with a bunch of people standing around talking. We came for the characters. Full stop. That’s what we’re here for. They will always be what matter the most.


End file.
